Reorganizing large amount of files with regex? - regex

Question

I have a large amount of files organized in a hierarchy of folders and particular file name notations and extensions. What I need to do, is write a program to walk through the tree of files and basically rename and reorganize them. I also need to generate a report of the changes and information about the transformed organization along with statistics.
The solution that I can see, is to walk through the tree of files just like any other tree data structure, and use regular expressions on the path name of the files. This seems very doable and not a huge amount of work. My questions are, is there tools I should be using other than just C# and regex? Perl comes to mind since I know it was originally designed for report generation, but I have no experience with the language. And also, is using regex for this situation viable, because I have only used it for file CONTENTS not file names and organization.

Answer 1

Yes, Perl can do this. Here's something pretty simple:
#! /usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find;
my $directory = "."; #Or whatever directory tree you're looking for...
find (\&wanted, $directory);
sub wanted {
print "Full File Name = <$File::Find::name>\n";
print "Directory Name = <$File::Find::dir>\n";
print "Basename = <$_\n>";
# Using tests to see various things about the file
if (-f $File::Find::name) {
print "File <$File::Find::name> is a file\n";
}
if (-d $File::Find::name) {
print "Directory <$File::Find::name> is a directory\n";
}
# Using regular expressions on the file name
if ($File::Find::name =~ /beans/) { #Using Regular expressions on file names
print "The file <$File::Find::name> contains the string <beans>\n";
}
}
The find command takes the directory, and calls the wanted subroutine for each file and directory in the entire directory tree. It is up to that subroutine to figure out what to do with that file.
As you can see, you can do various tests on the file, and use regular expressions to parse the file's name. You can also move, rename, or delete the file to your heart's content.
Perl will do exactly what you want. Now, all you have to do is learn it.

Answer 2

If you can live with glob patterns instead of regular expressions, mmv might be an option.
> ls
a1.txt a2.txt b34.txt
> mmv -v "?*.txt" "#2 - #1.txt"
a1.txt -> 1 - a.txt : done
a2.txt -> 2 - a.txt : done
b34.txt -> 34 - b.txt : done
Directories at any depth can be reorganized, too. Check out the manual. If you run Windows, you can find the tool in Cygwin.